I completely agree with Bruce. First, does anyone really believe
that the TSA needs all "72 airlines[' ...] June 2004 domestic
passenger flight records" in order to test their system?
Assuming the system were verifiable, a sample of real data would be
sufficient. Second, how will they know the difference between a
successful test and a failed test? Did they catch a set of actual
terrorists through other means in June 2004, so that they have a group
of expected true positive matches? Seems unlikely, given the
publicity that each minor incident has raised.

No, the purpose of the TSA test is not to verify their system --
such verification isn't possible, and if it were, all 72 airlines
would not need to participate for a valid test sample. The
real test the TSA is running is whether or not the airlines
will comply, and how badly the public will freak out.

Matt Haughey is getting beaten
up in the comments of his post about ad banners coming to TiVo,
but he's absolutely right to complain about TiVo's move. This
is a big deal, yet another chapter (along with the recent
TiVo-to-Go and Macrovision moves, and others in the past) in the
"two masters" problem for TiVo.

TiVo's original pitch was that it transformed television viewing
for the audience -- here are the set of features that you want to make
it "TV your way." Most prominent among these features was ad-skipping
-- certainly the reason I bought a TiVo. Ad banners during
ad-skipping are, at the very least, an odd choice, and they dilute and
poison the "TV your way" message. Matt's detractors have claimed that
sophisticated TiVo users will be able to get around the new feature
with the undocumented 30-second skip command, but they miss the
point.

Jeff Bezos apparently likes to say that Amazon always tries to
"delight the user" with the site's features; similarly, Steve Jobs
talks about "lickable" user interfaces. Don Norman's recent book
"Emotional Design" talks in depth about the emotional reactions great
products give us. TiVo is still usable with banner ads, and it may
still be possible for power users to avoid them altogether, but by any
interpretation, a person who bought a TiVo to skip ads will not
be delighted to see banner ads in their place. They will be
annoyed.

Open source projects are often spurred by developers trying to
"scratch an itch" they personally feel. TiVo has just spread Acme
itching powder all over their product. With competition from
above in the form of cable company DVRs, and from below in open source
DVRs, is that really the right move? Do they expect the revenue from
their banner ads to cover the potential lost revenue from users who
come to distrust their motives?

TiVo is still thinking like a small company that has no option but
bare survival. They should start thinking like a fighter. If they
don't fight for their users, they will wind up fighting
with their users, and that's a fight they'll lose.

Since Nelson and I have both been grousing
about Mac OS X's Terminal.app, I did some more research.
Command-doubleclick will open an URL in Terminal.app, but only if the
URL is one line long. Here's a better solution:

Edit "iTerm -> Preferences -> General -> Characters considered
part of a word" to have the value:

/*_-~+@%&.:;$,?=#

Documentation of this step found
here.
I added a '%' sign to the string.

Now Command-click in iTerm will open an URL, even if it wraps over several
lines.

Update: I updated the suggested "word" line after finding a few
holes and resorting to reading RFC 2396. I omitted
'!', "'", "(", and ")" because I think those would cause more parse
errors than they would solve in this context.

Let me just state for the record that if Apple were to
release a car stereo head unit, I would be first in line to buy
it. I would even replace my old, 2G iPod with a shiny new iPod at
whatever price they asked. Steering wheel controls would be nice, but
really all I need is a head unit with an iPod socket and nice
controls. Let's call it the iDash.

The car/iPod interface has been the worst part of the iPod
experience -- getting the iPod music playing out of the car speakers
is ridiculously hard, and just finding a place to rest the iPod while
it plays is comic. I've tried using cassette adapters, which fake out
the tape deck into playing iPod tunes, but they have consistently died
on me, either fraying at the cable that dangles out of the deck or
frying in the heat (just like a real cassette!). I've tried using
mini FM transmitters like the Griffin iTrip, but the sound quality is
terrible and finding a free radio channel in the Bay Area is
impossible. (I had one for a while, until some anti-enterprising San
Franciscans launched a pirate radio station on it.) I've tried
removing the CD changer and using an RCA adapter to wire the iPod in
directly, which, modulo the cables trailing from the trunk to the
front, was great for sound and stability -- until the damn thing
shorted out and took the turn signals, gas gauge, and brake lights
with it, a $600 repair. Now I'm back to the cassette adapter, and I
pack it into my bag every day as I head out of the car. What a pain.

Too many head units don't provide auxiliary input, and all the
solutions on the market are half-assed and clunky. A fantastic Apple
head unit would be an amazing tool for the iPod, and would really
change the car stereo experience.

Microsoft wasted a bunch of money on car PCs a few years ago.
Wouldn't it be funny if the iDash gave Apple a entry point to
automotive computing?

Mark Frauenfelder blogged
today about the Iowa
Electronic Markets (IEM), a futures market run by the University
of Iowa for studying predictions of political elections and other
events. I love the idea of these markets and have been following them
closely. While the Policy
Analysis Market caught some well-deserved criticism last summer, I
didn't think it was a crazy idea, but that it was more poorly explained than
poorly conceived.

I was following the IEM during the Democratic Presidential
primaries, and was disappointed with the results of what I saw. These
markets are sometimes claimed to "predict
the future," and rightly so in that they can expose upcoming
events that are for whatever reason non-obvious by conventional
wisdom. It was not obvious to me that Howard Dean would suffer such
an upset in the Iowa Caucuses, placing behind Kerry and Edwards
when all the polls were showing a different result. After the shoes
had all fallen, I went back to the IEM to see if these futures markets
-- based, after all, in Iowa -- had been able to predict what many of
us had missed.

It seems they did not. Graphs of the
market's activity show Dean and Clark (who placed sixth, behind
Kerry, Edwards, Dean, Gephardt, and Kucinich) leading right up until
the day of the caucuses, January 19th. Edwards, who placed second,
wasn't even offered as a separate contract until after the caucuses
were closed (he was included in the "rest of field" contract). I've
created a detail
graph of the end-of-day contract prices (drawn from here)
for Dean, Kerry and Clark in the days leading up to the caucuses, and
they don't show any clue that Dean was headed for a fall.

No one has claimed predictive markets are perfect, nor that they
can forecast everything -- just that they tend to outperform other
predictive measures. I'll be interested to see if this idea takes
greater hold over time, and gains in effectiveness as it involves more
participants.

It's interesting to read about Accenture and the award of the "Virtual
Border" contract from the Department of Homeland Security. This
Reuters article, like a recent NY Times
article on the same topic, talks about the attempts by the House
of Representatives to prevent Accenture receiving the contract, since
Accenture's corporate headquarters is not in the US -- it is in
Bermuda.

What's unfortunate about these articles is how obliquely they talk
about the reason Accenture is based in Bermuda. According to Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston, the
sole point of this is to reduce the corporate taxes Accenture pays -- they
are essentially shopping for a nation with laws most favorable to
their incorporation. In a chapter entitled "Profits Trump
Patriotism," Johnston talks about exactly this conflict between
national security and awarding government contracts to quasi-foreign
corporations -- including Accenture. It's too bad the explanation of
this issue isn't more clear in the articles covering it -- especially
since Johnston is a Times reporter.

I do think this is an interesting and important issue, and I'm glad
to see the House taking some action on it.

Update: The article
in Thursday's Times has a somewhat better explanation of the issue.

I had a fine time watching the new Harry Potter
movie last weekend -- you know it's a better movie when it
features a
tree with more personality than some of the characters in the
earlier episodes -- but was driven further down the road of hating
movie theaters, which once I loved.

Movie theaters are increasingly hostile environments. At this one
showing, we had:

about twenty minutes of ads, exclusive of the previews (which are
of course ads in themselves);

a few minutes of live and recorded exhortations to keep quiet and
turn off cell phones;

a full row of people behind us talking (sounded like a real-time
Italian translation of the whole movie);

two people in front of us talking;

three cell phone calls, unanswered;

one cell phone call (directly behind us), answered (at
least the Italian translation stopped for the duration of the call);

$4 for popcorn and $3.75 for a bottle of water;

$5 for parking;

$2 in Moviefone fees for two tickets (optional, but at this movie
arguably not if you wanted to see it opening weekend); oh, and

$19 for two tickets to the movie.

It would certainly be cheaper to buy the movie on DVD and own it
forever, than to watch it once for nearly twice the price; the popcorn
would be better, cheaper, and faster, and could be topped with real
butter instead of "topping"; the water would be tastier, colder, and
available for $1.49 per 100 cubic feet; and the talking would be
sanctioned or actionable. Plus, no ads. It's no wonder home theater
is booming.

How is it possible for this
article to make it into the New York Times a mere 11 days after this
article without making a connection between them? (Of course, the audience
is storming the projector on many more than just these two fronts.)